Instagram Stories as Literature: Narrative, Audience, and Form in Social Media Storytelling

Abstract

In this paper, we will discuss Instagram Stories as a specific style of digital storytelling with its narrative patterns, interactions with the audience, and differences with other social media networks, along with the standard models of short narrative that are flash fiction and diaries. The paper utilises a qualitative content analysis method to analyse Instagram Storeys shared between March and May 2023 as a form of analysis of the essential elements of narrative, thus including plot, character, and interactivity of the audience. The overall result indicates that Instagram Stories are distinguished by their fusion of brevity, multimodality, and interactivity, creating a dynamic, participatory narrative experience flow. Contrary to sites such as TikTok, Snapchat, and Twitter/X, the presence of multimedia and interactive tools in Instagram enables more complex and flexible storytelling. Furthermore, the work demonstrates how Instagram Stories have additional features that are standard to traditional communicative narratives as they focus on conciseness and self-expression. Finally, this study reveals how Instagram stories redesigned digital storytelling, which explains how social media is changing the purpose of narration building.

Keywords: Instagram Stories, Online Storytelling, Analysis of Narratives, Social Media Networks, User Engagement, Flash Fiction, Diaries, Multimodality, Interactivity, Comparative Analysis.